Translated material
Mission Impossible
Maria Petrova and Alexey Tikhonov failed to regain the title of European champions
At the European Figure Skating Championships in Warsaw, sports pairs competed for the first set of awards. The duo from Germany Alena Savchenko and Robin Zholkov won gold at the European Championship for the first time in their careers - 199.39 points. Russians Maria Petrova and Alexey Tikhonov became silver medalists - 179.61. “Bronze” went to the hosts of the tournament, spouses Dorota and Mariusz Zydek from Poland - 170.91.Ukrainian figure skater Alena Savchenko in a duet with Robin Zholkovy, half Tanzanian, brought Germany the second “gold” in the history of the continental championships. In 1995, winning coach Ingo Steuer and Mandy Wetzel achieved similar success in Dortmund.
Few doubted that at this championship the main contenders for medals would be two couples - German and Russian. In the short program, Savchenko made several mistakes, but she and her partner performed the free program flawlessly. We started with a triple flip, then jumped a triple toe loop, a triple Salchow, and demonstrated an interesting sequence of steps, rotations and lifts. For this program, set to the music for the film “Mission Impossible,” Savchenko and Zholkov earned 134.62 points, surpassing their personal record (123.62), which was set a year ago at the European Championships in Lyon, where they became silver medalists.
After the competition, Alena admitted that before going on the ice in the free program they were extremely concentrated: “I wanted to do everything that I did in training. Focused attention on the execution of each element. We have been walking towards this victory for so long. It was very difficult, but now we are happy. “With each new element we felt more and more confident, and therefore we even began to smile,” the partner added.
The significant difference in points between the first and second places eliminated all questions about the judging. This was confirmed by Oleg Vasiliev, coach of Olympic champions Tatyana Totmyanina and Maxim Marinin. According to Vasiliev, at the beginning of the free program, set to the music of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata,” Tikhonov twice came out of the jumps uncertainly, then the partners separated during the spin, and in the second part of the program they lost significant speed. Naturally, these blots did not go unnoticed by the judges. Nevertheless, this performance was incomparably better than what Maria and Alexey demonstrated in the Grand Prix final in St. Petersburg. It turned out that the music taken by their competitors turned out to be prophetic for the Russians. At the current championship, the mission of winning “gold” turned out to be beyond Petrova and Tikhonov’s strength.
However, the “silver” of the Warsaw championship is a huge success for the Russian couple. After all, at the end of last season, Maria and Alexey announced the end of their sports careers, and only at the request of the leadership of our Figure Skating Federation agreed to skate for another year to give the reserves the opportunity to catch up. In addition, the skaters took part in the Channel One television project “Stars on Ice,” which actually confused all their preparations and brought discord into their training. For this reason, the athletes even skipped the national championship in order to purposefully prepare for the European Championship. According to them, they didn’t even take a break for the New Year holidays; they spent almost all their time at the skating rink. But all of the above reasons, coupled with age (35-year-old Alexey Tikhonov is the most experienced participant in the championship), injuries, stress and fatigue affected the performance.
When asked by journalists what are your plans for the World Cup, Tikhonov replied that they plan to go there. “We love Tokyo, sushi, Disneyland, and if they send us there, we’ll go,” he joked. By the way, in the World Championship, unlike the European Championship, our country will be represented by only two pairs. And there are at least four contenders for these places: Petrova - Tikhonov, Obertas - Slavnov, Kawaguchi - Smirnov, Mukhortova - Trankov.
Our two other couples participating in the European Championship, Julia Obertas - Sergey Slavnov, Elena Efaeva - Alexey Menshikov, finished the tournament in fourth and sixth positions. The problem of Lyudmila Velikova's students remains the same: Yulia categorically does not want to be able to do jumps. But the debutants of the European Championship, Permians Efaeva and Menshikov, made a pleasant impression. It’s also pleasant because finally new names have begun to appear in Russian pair skating.